M3: Morphology page 33-34

Morphology is the study of words.  Individual words.  And how they are created or changed (you can think of this as words as "morphing") due to changes in prefixes or suffixes.  

Morphemes are the smallest units of words that have meaning.  Understanding the morphology of words is called "morphological awareness".  This helps us understand what words mean and how they function (ie. are they verbs or adverbs?).

• Let's take the word tree.  It has one morpheme, one part with meaning.
• Now let's look at the word trees. It has two morphemes or two parts with meaning.  Why?  because you can have "tree" by itself.  Adding "s" signifies plural or more than one.
• But you can't have "s" by itself.  It doesn't mean anything alone.  So it is called a bound morpheme because it has to be attached to another word.  
• Tree is a free morpheme because it does mean something and can stand alone. It is "free" to be in a sentence by itself without being attached to other words.

Recap:

• Morphology is the study of words by themselves.
• Morphemes are the smallest parts of words that have meaning.
• The word trees has 2 morphemes of “tree” + “s” which signifies plural
• Tree is a free morpheme (Can stand alone)
• S is a bound morpheme (cannot stand alone)

 

What about a word like thickeners?  Watch the video for her explanation of how to break down the word thickeners into morphemes.  Pay attention to how many morphemes and how the different affixes change the word to a different part of speech.

What would a question related to morphology look like on the ESL TExES Exam?

Possible Question:  You have an ESL student in your class from Shanghai. The student writes in their journal, “There are five chair in the room.”

This is an example of what kind of linguistic transfer issue?

a) syntactical

b) morphological

c) phonological

d) semantic